Scene Last Night: Gabelli, Boisi for Boston; Opera Yalies

Red roses and gold trim decked the Waldorf Astoria ballroom last night at the Boston CollegeWall Street Council black-tie dinner, which raised $2.7 million for scholarships.

BC’s president, the Rev. William Leahy, paid tribute to the victims of the marathon bombings. “I think of how Boston College responded, with care, compassion and concern, and that is what we think we are ultimately about,” Leahy said.

He also invoked the Jesuit school’s founding mission, to educate immigrants of the city. He saw it expressed last month at a naturalization ceremony for a freshman from Bhutan.

The Presidential Scholars Program, which is supported by the Wall Street Council, awards four years of full tuition to students among the top 1 percent of the freshman applicant pool. It has funded 299 scholars.

The council started 25 years ago to provide intellectual capital to the business school and economics department, said Geoffrey T. Boisi, chairman and chief executive of Roundtable Investment Partners LLC.

“We gathered the best and brightest of BC Wall Streeters at the time,” said Boisi, who was honored at the dinner. The goal was “to develop a customized BC infiltration strategy across Wall Street.”

“I gave $10 million” to create a scholarship in his name, Gabelli said, standing with Nadya Muchoney, a Gabelli scholar who plans to pursue graduate studies in plant and insect ecology.

“We both love research,” Gabelli said, noting his investment research of late has been focused on “3D and cyber security.”

After dinner, the Hank Lane Orchestra got a few of the 1,200 attendees dancing to a cover of Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” as legendary Celtics center Bill Russell, a guest of Boisi’s, posed for photographs.

Noting that some of his sons didn’t go to Boston College, Boisi, referring to the school’s colors, said, “they have red-and-gold hearts, but blend it in with their Yale blue blood.”

City Opera

A few Yalies were on hand for the New York City Opera gala performance of “La Perichole” at City Center.

They included: the general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera, George Steel, wearing a J. Press tuxedo; Maurice Samuels, a professor of French literature at Yale, and Caroline Weber, an associate professor of French literature at Barnard who received her Ph.D. from Yale.

Weber is working on a book about the high-society women who inspired Marcel Proust.

High society would not exactly describe the pretty Perichole, a street singer who performs a dance with pineapples on her head that doesn’t earn her enough to eat. Instead she gets drunk with a viceroy to high comic effect.

After the performance, guests did some drinking and eating of their own after moving to the Plaza Hotel. The menu started with pickled white asparagus and ended, like the opera, a little bananas, served with dark rum and caramel. The event for 360 guests raised $550,000.

Pimm’s Cup

Celebrating the U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Commission last night in Washington, Bay Fang, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, sipped a Pimm’s Cup. After Harvard, she went to Hong Kong and Beijing as a Fulbright scholar, studying international affairs.

Also in attendance at the residence of the British ambassador: John Jeffry Louis, incoming chairman of the U.S.- U.K. Fulbright Commission and an American venture capitalist living in London, and Tara Sonenshine, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.